


Caduceus

by MrProphet



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-25
Updated: 2017-04-25
Packaged: 2018-10-23 22:12:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10728306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrProphet/pseuds/MrProphet
Summary: As with Raiders of the Lost Gate and The Demiurge series, this fiction is in part inspired by the wilder fringes of Nazi archaeology.The Adlerhorst – or Eagle's Nest – at Berchtesgaden was Hitler's private hideaway.





	Caduceus

_May 2002  
Stargate Command, Cheyenne Mountain_

"Offworld activation," the PA announced, as the Stargate burst into life, and opened with its usual whoosh of spray. In the control room, Technician Davis sat at the console, as the computers compared an incoming signal with the master list of such data streams. After a moment, it reported a positive match with the current IDC for SG-11, and Davis pressed her hand onto the palm scanner to open the iris. The movements were mechanical, without animation or energy. The surface of the event horizon rippled, disgorging four figures, each caked in russet dust.

"No welcoming committee?" Dr Lauren Collister asked, a little concerned. Usually an incoming team would be met by out of the Gate by General Hammond or one of the other senior staff officers, and a break in that protocol suggested that something was amiss.

"Well," Major Darren Patterson, SG-11's commanding officer replied. "If it means we get to slip off to freshen up before debriefing, then breach of protocol or not, I won't be the one to complain."

"Amen to that," Lieutenant William ‘Duck' Caldicott agreed. "Egypt isn't that hot and dusty."

"It's not just the dust," Captain Amy Kawalsky said. "It's the way it clings." She tried, ineffectually, to brush the thick, blood-coloured film from her skin.

"Then it's agreed," Patterson decided. "I'll see what's going on and let you all know when it's time to debrief; meantime you guys can hit the showers."

The team headed for the locker room; aside from Patterson, who broke away from the group and made for the staff offices. Shortly before the other three reached their destination, Amy turned around and started heading back the way she had come.

"Anything wrong?" Collister asked.

"No; you go ahead. I just want to check something." As she spoke, Amy fiddled with a small amulet she had found on P2D-118. It looked as though it was made of bronze, verdigrised but remarkably well-preserved, and the symbol on the obverse – a caduceus surmounted by a dextroverse swastika – had tripped off something in Amy's memory. She wanted to see if Daniel recognised the emblem; and of course she just wanted to see Daniel.

Collister grinned, broadly. "You do that," she said, reading between the lines. "But remember; half-an-inch of brick dust isn't generally advised to impress that special someone."

 _On the other hand_ , Amy thought, gratefully. _It should be just great for covering a blush, thank God_. "I'll bear it in mind," she replied, before heading down the passage towards the archaeology labs.

Amy stuck her head round the door of Daniel's office, but although he had left it unlocked – again – Daniel himself was nowhere to be seen. Only one person was in the labs at all; Louise Stillwell, one of the graduate RAs.

"Hey, Louise," Amy greeted the younger woman. "Daniel around, or is he still offworld?"

Louise looked up, tears running silently down her cheeks; her eyes red and swollen from crying.

Amy felt a chill along her spine. "Louise?"

*

"Amy!" Daniel cried, alarmed. "Are you alright? What happened to you?"

"I…I'm fine," Amy managed, her voice choked. "It's just dust. But you?"

Daniel Jackson looked terrible. His skin was pale and sweaty, and marred by blisters and lesions. "I had a little accident," he told her.

"Louise said you might be…" Amy trailed off, unable to say the word.

"It's possible," Daniel replied, lightly. "Wouldn't be the first time."

"How can you joke…!" Amy's voice cracked, and great, fat tears cut smeared tracks through the dust on her face.

"Hey," Daniel whispered, taking her hand and squeezing it. His usually firm grip barely had any strength at all, and Amy found little comfort in it. "It's going to be okay," he assured her. "The guys are contacting everyone we know, and Janet says I've got ten or eleven days, so that's plenty of time to come up with something."

"But what if…?"

"Shh," Daniel interrupted, raising bandaged fingers to her lips, but not quite touching her, as though he feared she might find him disgusting in his present state. "Don't worry about me." He smiled, weakly. "I've made it through worse. Are you just back?"

"Yeah," Amy replied, . "We haven't even been debriefed yet actually. I found something I wanted to show you," she added.

Daniel nodded. "Okay," he told her. "Well, I guess you haven't been debriefed because everyone's in a fuss about the whole business on Kelowna; apparently I've been accused of sabotage and espionage…and possibly a few other things ending in ‘age' as well."

Amy smiled at his attempted levity, in spite of her anger at the mere idea. "That's ridiculous," she told him.

"That's what I said," Daniel agreed. "Anyway; Janet wants me to rest, and I'm in some pain; not a lot," he assured her. "But enough that I don't feel much like sleeping. She's going to put me on some max-strength sleepers, so I'll be out of it for the rest of the day. When you've done debriefing you should get some sleep as well; then come back and see me in the morning when we're both a little more clear-headed."

"Okay," Amy agreed, although she did not want to leave. She leaned over and kissed him gently on the forehead. "Sleep well."

 

After Amy had gone, Dr Janet Fraiser emerged from behind the curtains. "Daniel," she said, sadly. "You know I said hours, right; not days?"

Daniel nodded. "I know. I lied."

"Why?"

Daniel sighed. "Because…she's in love with me," he explained. "And while I admit there's a certain romantic attraction to having a beautiful woman sit devotedly by my bedside while I die, you know better than I do that this isn't going to be a nice, neat, soap opera death scene." He looked Janet in the eyes, challenging her to overrule him on this. "My body is pretty much going to rot where I lie, and I don't want her to see that."

*

Amy was tired after the mission, but did not sleep well that night for worrying. When she left her quarters in the morning her mood was subdued. She was distracted by her concerns; so much so in fact that her feet had carried her all the way to Daniel's office before she realised it. She began to turn away, to head for the infirmary, but then she noticed that the light was on in the office. Her heart lifting with relief, she pushed the door open, thinking that the Tok'ra or the Asgard must have been able to furnish a cure.

"Hey…!" She began.

Colonel Jack O'Neill looked up from behind Daniel's desk; his face was unreadable. "Kawalsky," he said, in a dazed voice. "I was just…I realised I didn't know what to do with any of his things. He didn't have any family and…"

Amy put out a hand towards Daniel's filing cabinet for support, but the top was stacked with loose folders – as always – and she slipped, stumbling into the room and scattering the papers across the floor. "Sorry," she said, crouching to gather them back up and trying not to jumble them. It might look a mess, but Daniel had his own, Zen-like filing system and if she got things out of order he would be lost when he came back.

Amy stopped, and sat back, a small moan escaping her lips as she realised that, of course, Daniel would not be coming back.

Daniel was dead.

Amy's body shuddered as she fought to contain the pain welling up inside her. Folders tumbled from nerveless fingers, and she began to sob, uncontrollably.

"Kawalsky?" Jack rose from the chair and came around the desk. He reached out towards Amy, whose grief-stricken cries grew louder, building into raw, primal howls and wracking her slight frame. Kneeling, he drew her gently against him, hugging her tightly, forgetting for the moment that he was her senior officer, and acting as though she were still just his best friend's kid sister. "Shh, Amy," he whispered.

Amy clutched at Jack's chest, and bawled her eyes out. She wept, and wailed, until her eyes and throat were raw, and her lungs ached. Jack looked up, helplessly, as a small crowd began to gather outside the office, drawn by the savage tumult of the young officer's mourning cries.

*

The next week was a living hell for Amy Kawalsky.

Each day she woke from a tormented sleep, sometimes forgetting for a few sweet moments that Daniel was gone, before it all came flooding back. Around the base, people stared at her while pretending not to, half-expecting her to burst into tears at any moment. Her friends and colleagues began to treat her as though she were made of glass, for the same reason. As though her unbridled display of emotion had set her apart from the dour professionals of the SGC, she began to feel like an outsider, in a way she had not done since joining the Air Force.

At times it al felt unreal; as though she were stuck in some kind of nightmare. Of course it only made things worse that she could not see Daniel's body. Colonel O'Neill tried to explain what had happened; how Daniel had not really died, but ascended to a higher state of being. Amy struggled to understand, but all that she really got was an aching wish that Daniel were there to make sense of O'Neill's disjointed exposition. That, and a clear understanding that the Colonel had instructed Jacob-Selmak to allow Daniel to die. Amy had known Jack for most of her life – as a young girl she had called him Uncle Jack, and viewed him as a seventh brother – and so it hurt to hate him as much as she did now, but she could not help it.

 

At the memorial service – while there was a coffin and an internment, she could not think of it as a funeral without a body – she declined to give a eulogy. What she felt for Daniel was private, and she knew that she would only choke up anyway. Major Carter and General Hammond each gave a short but touching speech. Colonel O'Neill's offering was good, but Amy could barely concentrate on the words for the irrational anger she felt at his presence. Angharad Midhir – Daniel's ex-wife – gave the longest and most moving speech, and Amy almost broke down when she caught herself making a note to ask Daniel if the Welsh archaeologist had any bards in her family tree.

Amy's composure finally slipped as the coffin was lowered and Teal'c sang the Chulakan equivalent of Amazing Grace in a clear but untrained baritone. While she did not collapse as she had done in Daniel's office, she wept harder and louder than anyone else there, and felt awkward and almost disrespectful for doing so. Angharad put an arm around her shoulders, and Amy clung to the older woman for support as she cried.

"I'm sorry," Amy said, as they made their way from the graveside. Ahead of them, Angharad's son Llew walked with Cassandra Fraiser, their hands clasped as if welded together. They were as confused as Amy by Daniel's not-quite death, and clung to each other as something real and tangible.

"It's a funeral, pet," Angharad assured her. "It's okay to cry."

Amy gave a choked laugh. "I guess," she admitted. "I'm glad they decided against a military funeral," she added.

"Would he be allowed one?"

"There was some talk of Colonel O'Neill and General Hammond pulling a few strings," Amy replied. "But in the end they felt that Daniel wouldn't have wanted it. They were right of course…The salute: He never really liked guns," she finished.

"That he didn't," Angharad agreed, linking an arm companionably through Amy's. "You mind if I ask you a question?"

"Guess not," Amy allowed.

"I think I get why you're angry at Jack – and I'm not going to say anything about that, because I'm sure it wouldn't be anything you hadn't thought already – but why are you cross with Daniel?"

Amy swallowed another sob, not bothering to deny it. "Because he wouldn't let me say goodbye," she said. "He sent me away, so I couldn't be with him at the end. Aren't you going to tell me he thought it was for the best?" She asked, when Angharad made no reply.

"I figured you knew that already," Angharad told her. "Besides, I understand why you're upset," she assured Amy. "Nothing I say will make it better; only time."

"Time," Amy agreed, bleakly. "But how much time?"

_*_

_Three months later  
SGC Beta Facility, Antarctica_

Amy stared sullenly at the ice core lying on the table in front of her. "You know," she said. "I have nothing against ice, but in the last few weeks; I've seen a lot more of it than I ever wanted to."

"So request a transfer," Dr Paul Fairbrass advised, with a genial smile. "Get out of here while you're still sane." A palaeogeologist by trade, he never seemed to tire of ice cores. Although young, he was one of the best in his field, which was why the SGC had employed him in the first place, notwithstanding that he carried a British and not a US passport.

"A little shorter than usual isn't it?"

Paul nodded. "Something blunted the bit," he said. "They're digging down to it now."

"Wow," Amy replied. "I thought those drill bits were diamond-edged?"

"Well they are," Paul explained. "But everything wears down eventually, and ice is tougher than it looks. Add the continual freezing and warming of the metal, and you get a fairly short shelf-life. In this case though, I guess what did the trick was the rest of this." He dug in the compacted mud at the bottom of the core, and fished out a chunk of stone.

Amy took the fragment from Paul and examined it. "This looks worked," she said. "How old is it?"

Paul shrugged. "Damned if I know. This core is all screwed up." He pointed to the top of the core. "Here we have the clean ice; about fifty years worth of build-up I'd say. Then this is all a mess, like the ice and the upper layers of rock were jumbled about. We get a lot of that around this area of the site; I hear it's related to some Nazi expedition during the war."

"Hmm…" Amy replied, distractedly, carefully brushing the accumulated muck from the fragment. "Hello."

"What is it?"

"Well, whatever it is, it isn't Nazi."

Paul leaned over to examine the sherd. It was fashioned from a dark , hard stone, similar in appearance to volcanic basalt. "It must be very hard," he commented. To have blunted the drill bit."

"Yet it was cut right through," Amy replied.

"This wasn't cut," Paul told her. "It cracked; you can see in the cross-section the patterns of fracture are…" He broke off. "Sorry."

"It's okay," Amy assured him. "I'm an anthropologist; I actually find this stuff kind of interesting."

Paul smiled at her. "It's been frozen and compressed by the mass of ice above it until it became brittle," he explained. "When the drill hit it shattered along an existing fault line." He looked more closely. "That's…odd," he said.

"What is?" Amy asked, evasively, moving the fragment away.

"That symbol on the stone; it's the same as your pendant."

The symbol, carved in raised relief on the face of the sherd, was a caduceus, bearing a dextroverse swastika at the crown, and was indeed very similar to that on the medallion from P2D-118 that Amy wore alongside her dog-tags and crucifix. The night before Daniel's death, Amy had realised that she had left the amulet in her pocket, and forgotten to include it in the final mission inventory. She had strung it on the chain around her neck, meaning to add it to the archive the next day, but Daniel's death had driven it completely from her mind. No-one had ever mentioned the discrepancy between the mission logs and the catalogue, and Amy had ended up keeping the thing, polishing it to remove the verdigris. She was not really sure why she still wore it, but sometimes she felt that she was still waiting to show it to Daniel.

Feeling a little self-conscious, Amy fiddled nervously with the coin-sized talisman.

"You okay?" Paul asked.

"It's just…I shouldn't really have this," she said. "Technically it belongs to the USAF. Most people mistake it for a Saint Christopher or something," she added.

Paul shrugged, and looked a little awkward himself. "I suppose I just took a particular interest," he admitted.

"Huh?" Amy looked at him in confusion.

"I know there isn't much of a social life at this base," Paul told her. "But would you like to have dinner with me one day?"

"Oh!" Amy replied, alarmed. "Oh!"

Paul nodded. "Not quite the response I was hoping for," he confessed. "I realise that the mess hall isn't the most romantic of venues…"

"N-no. It's not…it's not that," she told him. "But I just can't. There is – was – someone else, and I…It's too soon."

Paul backed off. "Sure," he said. "I'm sorry."

"No," Amy said again. "It's sweet of you to ask. I just can't."

"I understand," he assured her.

 

Amy made her way back to her quarters in a pensive mood. She liked Paul, and enjoyed working with him, but if he was attracted to her that made things complicated; lately, she had had enough of complicated.

Her quarters were pretty Spartan, but then so was the rest of the Beta Facility. In fact, her room was a lot better than most at the base, since her Air Force captaincy was the third highest Air Force rank within several hundred miles. The only other officers on-site were Lieutenant-Colonel Waldron, the base commander, his ADC Captain Warren – who outranked Amy on grounds of seniority – and Dr Griffin, who was a Lieutenant. The remaining personnel were a supply sergeant who doubled as nurse, a handful of SGC scientists, a five-man security force, and an ever-shifting parade of consultants.

The consultants were civilian experts, usually brought in for a specific task, such as Paul's ice core analysis. They were not informed of the SGC's existence, merely invited to participate in a USAF administered scientific survey. They were required to sign a non-disclosure agreement, assigned a role or a problem to solve, then shipped out before they could see too much. In the case of foreign naturals like Paul, the consultants were also required to sign an affidavit agreeing that litigation over breach of the signed agreement would be conducted under US jurisdiction, and that they would return to the US if required to face such litigation.

Paul had been at the base almost as long as Amy, making him by far the longest serving consultant on the project. His role was the analysis of ice cores to establish a chronology for the site where the Earth's original Stargate had been located, and this was taking him some time. The damage done during the Nazi excavation in 1943 – about which details were still sketchy – made dating much of the site extremely difficult.

This morning's core was a case in point: The stone fragment could have been fifty years old as easily as fifty-thousand for all they could tell. Of course Amy would put this in her report, and then have to explain – again – that it was _not_ possible to carbon date stone when the bean counters denied her the funds to run it through a dating process that would actually work. Considering the amount already spent on the Stargate Program, Amy was always astonished at their reticence to spring for the occasional electron spin resonance or thermo-luminescence dating test.

Amy sighed, and tried to bring her mind to a topic that did not involve dating. She sat at her desk, and lifted the narrow chain from around her neck. She held the little amulet in her palm, studying it intensely, as though she would see something she had missed the last hundred times she had examined it.

The working on the bronze was of a high standard, the amulet cast in a mould that was almost flawless. The only blemish marring the near-perfect circle of the pendant was a set of three raised bars on the upper edge, and Amy felt certain that this was deliberate. If another amulet of this type were to emerge, she was certain that it would have a different number of bars; a numbering system for a series of unique castings, like on the limited edition printing of Homer that Daniel had bought for her birthday last year.

 _Damnit!_ Amy thought. _Can't I do anything without coming back to him?_

Amy set the stone fragment next to the amulet and compared the two. They were indeed uncannily similar, and the working on the stone piece was equally precise. The symmetry of the two pieces was most striking; the wings on each side were mirror images of each other, and the snakes twined in identical loops, although their heads were subtly different. To achieve that level of precision by hand must have taken artistry of an extraordinary degree. The nagging feeling that she had seen the symbol somewhere before remained, but she still had no idea where. She had searched the SGC archives and found nothing; nor had any of  the conventional sources turned up anything.

Shaking her head in defeat, Amy set the fragment aside, and hung the pendant back around her neck. Then she opened her laptop, booted up and opened a file called _thesis.doc_. The title at the top of the page read: ‘Lies, Damned Lies and Hieroglyphics: Propaganda and resistance in the religious and secular writings and inscriptions of the pre-Christian Near and Middle East'. There followed about three thousand words of text, ending in an unfinished sentence. The file properties would have informed Amy – had she needed reminding – that the last alteration to the document had been made the day before she left for P2D-118; two days before Daniel's death.

A separate file contained reams of notes and references, including the basic structure for the entire thesis. The same folder included copies of many of the site reports, artefact catalogue records and other data which were essential to the project. Amy had organised her work diligently and thoroughly, including a timetable, according to which she should by now have written twice as much as she had, but she could not seem to even finish this sentence. Amy knew that if she opened her email there would be another message from Dr Collister – who had agreed to act as her supervisor – asking her to send an update on her progress, urgently.

Amy was well aware that she was in imminent danger of losing her funding, but since Daniel's death, she had felt unable to work on the thesis at all. It had been Daniel who pushed her to finish her first degree when she was flagging; Daniel who encouraged her to undertake a graduate thesis instead of focusing on her military career. Amy had always known that she would join the Air Force – everyone in her family was USAF, except Uncle Mike, the black sheep of the family who had joined the Navy instead – but until she had got to know Daniel, had never even thought of making a name for herself as an academic. Under his guidance she had published two very successful articles and a conference paper, and begun two more, but those had fallen by the wayside as well, and she had dropped out of the conference, withdrawing her paper from the proceedings.

Amy realised suddenly that she was crying. The computer had gone into screen saver mode, and she angrily jostled the mouse, then shut down the editor, banishing the accusingly unfinished thesis to the darkest depths of the hard drive.

Trying to change her train of thought, Amy went back to the caduceus symbol, trying to remember where she had seen it before. It had been larger, she recalled; not a pendant at all, but something much bigger, being carried by a man.

"A soldier," she said to herself. "A man in a uniform. Air Force; Army…Something." It was in black and white, she realised. She had not seen the artefact itself, just an image; a grainy, black and white photograph. That meant that it must predate the Stargate programme; so where else might it have come from.

The screen of her computer went dark again, drawing Amy's attention. She caught a glimpse of her reflection, and grimaced.

Amy got up and went over to her small sink. She turned on the hot tap and rinsed the tears from her eyes before examining herself. She looked strung out and tired, which was understandable because she was both. She had great, dark bags under her eyes from too little sleep, her face was thin and pinched from not eating enough, and her hair was simply a mess; grown out some way beyond regulation it was now a mass of dark, tangled curls.

It was amazing that anyone would want to go out with her looking like this, and never mind that she was still wearing the same three layers of shapeless clothes as three days ago.

She leaned closer, scrutinising herself with a critical eye, and was not impressed with what she saw.

She frowned, and looked down. Her pendant hung outside her shirt, the mirror turning the dextroverse swastika around. Amy's frown deepened, and she tilted the pendant slightly.

"The Nazis," she realised.

She rushed back to her laptop, logged on to the base network and accessed the SGC's privileged database. She clicked into the catalogue of artefacts held at Area 51, and ran a search for items originally seized from the Wewelsburg or the Adlerhorst at Berchtesgaden. The Groom Lake computers were always slow – Amy suspected that the PTB at Dreamlands resented the SGC's funding and made sure that any requests from Areas 52 or 53 received minimum priority. This was compounded by the appalling lag on the internet connection, which was after all routed through the main satellite relay, and not given high priority either.

She set the interrogation programme to keep retrying the search if it timed out, and waited.

After a while, she fell asleep.

*

Amy woke to a knocking at her door. She blinked, bleary-eyed, and stretched the stiff muscles in the yoke of her shoulders where she had been hunched over her desk. As she gathered her scattered thoughts, her mind trying to slide back into a dream it already could not quite remember, she noticed that the database interrogator was reporting three matches to her criteria.

  1. _Item ref # SAI-45-23415 – Caduceus staff, recovered Wewelsburg 1945. Current location: Groom Lake storage facility._
  2. _Item ref # SAI-45-43768 – Caduceus amulet, recovered Adlerhorst 1945. Current location, Pentagon special storage facility._
  3. _Item ref # SAI-45-21398 – Flagstone with caduceus emblem, recovered Wewelsburg 1945._ _Current location, Groom Lake storage facility._



Excitedly, Amy clicked on the first result, bringing up a summary on the staff, and there was the picture; a black and white photograph of a young soldier bringing the artefact out of the Wewelsburg. According to the caption, the man behind him was carrying a Spear of Destiny, but it looked a lot like a staff weapon to Amy. A second image showed the caduceus staff itself in glorious Technicolor, a beautiful, pearl-white object, fashioned with evident skill and the same perfect symmetry as the amulet and the relief carving. On the other side of the screen was a list of the research papers written on the staff, the results of tests run on it, and other artefacts associated with it. The last entry in the list had been made in 1976, only about eighteen months after Amy herself had been born.

Another knock reminded Amy of why she had woken up, and she opened the door. "Yes?"

"Christ, you look like you've been dragged through a hedge backwards," Paul told her.

"Flattery will get you nowhere," she groused. "Anyway," she added, looking him over in his heavy coat, shaggy blonde hair tangled and a two month beard still failing to convincingly cover his chin. "You look like a refugee from a Polish trawler."

"Curses; my secret is out."

"Bleagh," Amy replied, because it seemed reasonable at the time.

Paul frowned. "Have you even been to bed?"

"I've slept," Amy replied, evasively.

"You should take better care of yourself," Paul said.

"If you tell me that if I don't have my health I don't have anything," Amy growled. "I'll probably smash your face in."

Paul sighed. "Why don't you straighten yourself out and come have breakfast," he suggested. "In a strictly food-eating, non-date fashion."

"I'll just get some coffee," Amy said.

"Oh, come on, Amy. Most important meal of the day?" He prompted.

"What are you? An extra from Sesame Street?"

"I don't have that kind of wisdom," Paul assured her. "I'm just a hack who parrots the profound words of Oscar the Grouch."

"Well…thanks, but no thanks," Amy replied. She turned to go, and heard some thing rattle behind her. "Is that…?" She half turned.

"Colombian roast," Paul assured her, rattling the jar of beans again.

" _Real_ coffee?"

"Just in with the latest supply run. But only if you come and eat something," he added.

"Five minutes," she said.

*

"So what I don't get," Amy said, taking another ecstatic sip of her coffee. After months of the ever-thickening tar they squeezed out of the coffee urn day after day, it was like nectar: Scalding hot, bitter, caffeine-laden nectar. "Is why an Englishman has real coffee?"

Paul grinned. "We're not all tea addicts," he assured her.

"Well, pop goes another of my carefully maintained illusions," Amy replied. "Next thing you'll be telling me there's no Easter Bunny." She realised that Paul was staring at her. "What? Do I have something on my face?"

"A smile," he told her. "I don't think I've really seen one of those there before."

Amy's face became solemn again.

"And now I've chased it off," Paul mourned.

"It's not you," Amy said. "Really."

"Do you want to talk about it?" Paul asked. "I mean; I know I'm an interested party, but I am a good listener."

Amy sighed, sadly. "Daniel," she said. "Daniel Jackson, was his name. He worked with my brother, before Charlie was killed, and I met him at the funeral. We stayed in touch and he helped me out sometimes with my college work; hooked me up for a dig in my final year. I was smitten with him from the off; he was so sweet and strong and funny and clever and compassionate. I came up with every excuse to spend time with him, but he never seemed to know how I felt…or to feel the same way."

"Until…?" Paul prompted, when she did not continue.

"No until," she replied. "We were friends and we worked together, but I was never anything more to him. After a while I told him how I felt, and I kept thinking…I was so sure that one day he'd come around, you know? It was like…an Article of Faith: Transubstantiation; Immaculate Conception; Virgin Birth; one day Daniel will conceive a helpless passion for Amy. But he never did, and then…he was gone. He was only thirty seven."

Paul swallowed hard. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't realise."

"It hurt to lose him; and it hurt that he didn't think I was worth staying for."

"That's a little harsh," Paul told her.

"I know," Amy replied. "But it felt that way at the time. I'd kind of built my life around him: I ate when I knew he'd be in the commissary; spent a lot of my free time helping out in the arch labs. Without him the old base seemed so…cold. And I felt like he'd abandoned me."

"I'm sorry," Paul said, kindly.

"That's why I came down here," Amy explained. "Where I don't keep seeing him turning the corners ahead of me. That happened back at the base; sometimes I'd actually run to catch up before I realised." She fell silent, staring into her coffee. "Does that sound stupid?"

"Not at all," Paul assured her. "I still haven't got used to the fact that my Mum isn't around anymore."

"Oh no," Amy said. "I'm so sorry."

"It's okay," he replied. "It was a few years ago now, and it was peaceful. She was old; married late and had children later."

Amy sipped her coffee, pensively. "You know…I feel a little better for talking about this. Thank you."

Paul smiled. "I suspect you also feel better for getting a decent meal in you," he said. "Maybe you'll feel even better when you see what we turned when we were digging down to that surface the drill hit yesterday."

"Hmm?" Amy asked, her mouth full of coffee.

"We found a body," he told her. "Honest to God, a _human_ body."

Amy tried to assay an expression of pure astonishment. "Fancy that."

Paul frowned. "You know, when I first met you, you looked so grim that I thought you must be one of those people who only gets excited about their work; but you don't. Nothing ever seems to animate you at all."

Amy sighed. "I'm excited," she said. "But it's not the first body to turn up on this sight site."

"Oh," Paul said.

Amy bit her lip. "I didn't just tell you that, okay?" She said.

"Sure," Paul replied, coolly. "I've already had Captain Warren explain that we haven't found this guy. But still, did any of these other not-bodies you haven't turned up have a pendant like yours?"

"What?" That did make Amy sit up.

"He was still pretty iced up when I left him," Paul admitted. "But it looked like he was wearing a caduceus amulet."

*

When Amy and Paul reached Lab 2, the body was largely thawed. It had been lain on the examination table and surrounded by space heaters, with a few buckets to catch the melt-water before it could freeze on the floor. An autopsy set had been laid out on a tray, but the doctor had not yet begun his examination.

"So, what do you make of him?" Paul asked.

"Interesting," Amy said, half talking to herself. "It looks as though he was expecting the cold."

"At the South Pole? Fancy that," Paul replied. "He's very well preserved," he noted, when Amy made no response.

Amy grunted, looking the corpse over with a worried eye. As with most of the bodies found at the site, this one was clad in armour of Goa'uld design. Moreover, to Amy's expert eye, the armour was clearly that of an elite order – such as a Horus or Serpent Guard, although it bore the distinguishing marks of neither of those groups – and not of a simple Jaffa warrior. Unlike most of his companions in death however, this particular ice mummy had evidently come prepared for the cold. While most of the dead Jaffa had suffered a travelling accident which sent them here instead of to Ra's palace at Giza, this individual had known that his destination would be covered in ice, and he wore the tattered and matted remains of heavy furs over his armour.

Paul was certainly right about the state of preservation in the body. He almost looked as though he had died a few hours ago, not a few millennia, and that too was cause for concern. His skin had paled from the cold, but retained a Mediterranean tone and showed no sign of frostbite. His features had a Hellenic cast, and his black hair was cut about his shoulders. There was no sign of injury on the body, except that his right hand had been sheared cleanly from his arm at the wrist by a shift in the ice floes which held him.

"Looks like he was young," Paul said.

"Looks can be deceiving," Amy replied, peeling back the damp furs to examine the armour. Both a plaque on the man's breastplate, and the brooch which secured the furs about his neck bore the symbol of a crescent moon, carrying a lunar disk. "Thoth," she whispered.

"Pardon?" Paul asked.

"Nothing," Amy replied. She reached down and fingered the amulet around the corpse's neck. As Paul had spotted, the design was again very similar to that of her pendant, but this one was not cast from bronze. "You should go," she told the palaeogeologist.

"What do you mean?" Paul asked.

"I mean you should leave," she told him. "You shouldn't be seeing this."

Paul fumed. "What do you mean, I shouldn't see this? I dug it up. Amy…"

"Don't argue with me, Dr Fairbrass," Amy warned, drawing herself up.

The young man flinched as though she had hit him. "Whatever you say, Captain," he agreed, trying to hide his hurt behind anger. He turned and stalked out, leaving Amy with the body.

Amy slumped again, feeling wretched, and forced her mind back to her work. Fetching a small instrument from the closet, she held it near to the amulet; the reading confirmed her theory: The amulet had been forged out of naquada. Amy slid her hand along the collar of the armour until she found a small toggle, and an enclosing helm expanded from behind the man's neck. Amy shook her head, impressed. "They really build these things to last," she said to herself.

The helmet was superficially canine in appearance, but Amy knew better: The mask represented a Cynocephalus baboon, and tallied with the markings on the brooch and breastplate as a symbol of the Egyptian god of wisdom, Thoth. The man's brow had been unmarked however, suggesting that this was no simple ‘Baboon guard'. Amy checked the armour over the man's abdomen, and found no fastenings or release mechanisms. The prim'ta carried in a Jaffa's belly was usually more valuable to the Goa'uld – if only barely – than the man who carried it, and had to be able to escape if the incubator was killed, or if it could wait no longer before seeking a host. Thus, no Jaffa's armour would be without an abdominal flap, meaning that this was no Jaffa.

"Thoth?" Amy wondered. "Or one of his servants?" She drummed her fingers pensively on his breastplate.

Amy turned away from the body and started towards the intercom, but halted when she heard a sound behind her; the sound of the helmet retracting again. She froze, a tight, cold sensation gripping her spine and causing her to shiver. She reached out a hand, and slowly closed her fingers around the handle of an autopsy knife.

 

Outside the lab, Paul was pacing angrily up and down, waiting to give Amy a piece of his mind. Plainly the Air Force was up to something more than administrating a survey expedition, and just as plainly, Amy was in on it. While he had half-expected that the other military personnel on the base were more than they seemed, Paul had hoped that Amy was present purely in a scientific capacity. Until today, he had never seen the martial side of her emerge so clearly. He reminded himself over and over of the coldness in her eyes when she ordered him from the infirmary, trying to force aside his feelings for the person she had seemed to be for so many weeks, and the friendship he had thought they shared.

He was running over his rant for the fifth time when he heard the crash from the lab. He half turned, then heard a muffled cry and rushed inside, all other thoughts and emotions forgotten in his concern for Amy's safety.

"Amy!"

"Paul?" Amy turned to face him, looking baffled. "I…I told you to stay outside."

"I thought you were hurt," he replied, hotly, his resentful anger welling up again at her dismissive tone. "I was worried about you."

"I'm fine," she told him. "I just knocked the…autopsy tray over." She gestured at the floor, where the knives and saws were scattered around.

"You cried out," Paul said, stooping to gather up the fallen instruments.

"I just swore because I was startled," she assured him. "You should…go. There's nothing wrong."

"Are you sure you're okay?" Paul asked, pulling the autopsy tray over to him.

"You think I wouldn't know?" Amy demanded. "Just go, Paul."

Paul snorted in exasperation, and slammed a handful of knives down onto the tray, so hard that one of them bounced and skipped across the floor again. "Fine," he said, going after the renegade blade. "I apologise for giving a…" He stopped, staring in alarm at a small cluster of red droplets on the floor in front of him. "Amy," he said. "There's blood on the floor here."

"What?"

Paul touched the spots, and found that they had not quite frozen yet. "It's fresh," he said, concerned again. "I think maybe you hit your head or something. I'm taking you to medical; no arguments."

 

Dr Griffin stood back from his patient. "You seem to be in perfect health, Captain," he assured her. "No concussions, and certainly no cuts."

"Thanks, Doc," Amy said, standing up. "Happy now?" She demanded of Paul.

"I was worried," he said, following as she swept out of the doctor's office. "And if you're not hurt, where did the blood come from."

"Maybe up here?" Amy suggested, turning suddenly and tapping her finger on Paul's temple. "I sure as hell didn't see any blood. You're a control freak, Paul, and I think you're just inventing reasons to order me around."

"What?" Paul gaped in disbelief.

Amy relented, but only a little. "I don't need to be taken care of," she told Paul. "And I don't need to be told what to do. Just…leave me alone." She turned again and strode away, leaving Paul feeling hurt and disoriented.

*

Amy returned to her quarters, and sat pensively at her laptop, recalling the information on the caduceus staff. Although a catalogue entry had been made for the artefact, it seemed that it was not possible to use the automated ordering system to request its release for study. Instead, Amy sent an email to the Special Quartermaster at Groom Lake, asking that the staff be shipped to Area 52 as a matter of urgency. Once that was done, she took up her telephone, and dialled a four digit number.

A tinny voice spoke in Amy's ear. "Colonel Waldron's office; Captain Warren speaking."

"This is Captain Kawalsky," Amy replied. "I have a priority request for the Colonel."

"What request is that?" Warren asked.

"I need to examine an item at the SGC labs. I'm having it sent from Area 51, but I need to go out on today's transport return if at all possible." Supply transports came to the facility once a week, leaving approximately eight hours after arrival, giving the pilots time to rest and recuperate. Ordinarily, to be on that transport Amy would have had to apply for leave or a temporary transfer a week ago.

"So you want a special travel release within the next two hours?" Warren asked.

"Yes, Sir," Amy replied.

"Tell me, Kawalsky; would you call this a matter of life and death?"

"Something like that," Amy replied. "High priority anyway."

"I'll see what I can do," Warren promised. "How long will you be needing?"

"About a week," Amy replied. "Less than two anyway; I'll be back on the transport after next."

*

Paul caught up with Amy on the small landing field where the Chinook was waiting to carry her to Port Stanley. He had obviously run to make it in time, and he looked hot and out of breath.

"You should go back inside," she said, gently. "You'll catch your death standing out here like that."

"I just came to say goodbye," he said. "Didn't want to miss you."

Amy frowned. "For that you die of pneumonia? I'll be back in two weeks."

"I'll be gone in one," Paul replied. "Captain Warren told me just now; they want me to finish up, then I ship out on the next run." He gave a slightly bitter smile. "Guess I saw too much."

"I'm sorry," Amy replied, blandly.

"It's not your fault," Paul said. "Anyway, I just wanted to say goodbye, and that I'll miss you, Amy." He paused, and Amy began to turn away. "Warren says you asked for two weeks," Paul blurted out. "Why not take three; get away from work for a while."

"Paul," Amy gasped, impatiently. "I've got a mother, _and_ a father, _and_ five brothers to nag me; I don't need you doing it as well."

"Of course not," Paul snorted. "Not when you're coping with life so well on your own."

"Who the hell do you think you are to tell me how I should run my life?" Amy demanded.

"I'm your _friend_ ," Paul told her.

"We're not friends," Amy hissed.

Paul was stung. "Apparently not," he said, with brittle calm. "I guess a tough girl like you doesn't need friends."

"Shut up, Paul," Amy ordered him.

"No," Paul replied. "I mean; if I'm never going to see you again, who cares if you hate me. I'm worried about you, Amy. I'm not going to pretend that I'm not, and I'm not going to apologise for it either."

"I've got a lot to deal with," Amy told him, tightly.

"So deal with it," he said. "Don't hide at the South Pole, making yourself ill and obsessing over things you can't change."

Amy steamed. "Were you born this pompous?" She demanded. "Or did it take practice?"

"Many late nights of study," he replied, in a taut voice. "And a baby sister almost as stupidly pig-headed as you."

Amy's eyes widened in shock. "So I'm stupid now?"

"I didn't say…" Paul broke off in alarm as Amy grabbed the collar of his coat and dragged him close to her. His balance went and he almost fell, supported only by her grip.

"My problems are my problems," she whispered, angrily. "They are none of your business, so stay out of matters that do not concern you." With that, she thrust him away and stalked towards the plane, leaving Paul to land heavily on the icy ground. "Do yourself a favour," she called over her shoulder. "When you get back, don't try looking me up."

 

Amy strapped herself into the Chinook, and studiously avoided making eye contact with the shaven-headed woman sitting across from her. Amy only really knew Master Sergeant Carol Henderson by name and reputation, but the older woman did not seem prepared to let this dissuade her from making conversation.

"That looked pretty…intense," Henderson said. "Lover's tiff?" She asked, when Amy made no response.

Amy snorted, derisively. "He wishes," she replied. "Look," she added, more softly. "I really don't want to talk about it, and I really, _really_ don't need advice right now, Henderson."

Henderson smiled, kindly. "Just give it time," she recommended. "Time heals all wounds."

Amy gave a bitter, angry laugh. "So people keep telling me," she said. "But they're wrong. Time takes everything away from you. If you wait for someone too long, she slips away from you and there's nothing you can do but mourn lost possibilities."

"She?" Henderson asked.

"He," Amy corrected herself.

"I won't ask if you don't tell," Henderson assured her. She shook her head. "How do you get to be so cynical at your age, anyway?"

Amy smiled. "I'm a quick study. How does a master sergeant get to be such a romantic?" She retorted, affably. "Or maybe, how does a romantic get to be a master sergeant?"

"There's life and there's work, honey," Henderson replied. "Trick is keeping them apart and not letting one of them wither and die."

Amy gave a sad smile, and suddenly looked much older than she really was. "I hope that you continue to do so, Sergeant Henderson," she said. "It may be too late for me."

*

Paul stormed back into the Beta Facility in a foul mood, not stopping to watch the helicopter leave. He had run over his behaviour in his mind, and he was certain he had done nothing to earn the kind of venom that Amy had unleashed on him. He accepted that she did not want to go out with him, but that was no reason for her to be rude; let alone violent.

"I can't believe I ever felt sorry for her," he muttered, shivering as his body cooled down. He was angry with her now; angry enough to talk to himself, which he only did when he was really upset. She was right about one thing of course; he should not have been running around in Antarctic conditions, but he had been so desperate to patch up any hard feelings before they were out of each other's lives. "Another roaring success," he noted.

Unsure what to do next, Paul headed for the lab. He had an ice core to analyse in Lab 1, but instead he made his way to Lab 2, where the corpse still lay, and looked on the ground where he had thought he saw blood. There was nothing there now, and he wondered if perhaps he had just imagined it.

"What do you think?" He asked the dead man. "Am I a whacked-out control freak? Is Amy crazy enough to come and hide the evidence? No; even if she were, she'd have to be injured and the Doc gave her a clean bill." Paul leaned heavily on the table. "Is she crazy?" He wondered aloud. "Am I…?"

Paul recoiled from the table as he felt something wet on the back of his hand. He looked down, and saw a rivulet of blood seeping into his glove. His hand had been resting next to the corpse's stump; it was bleeding.

"I think I may be sick," Paul announced to the world in general, but with an effort he retained his composure. He stared in horror at the trickle of fluid seeping from the millennia old veins, trying to convince himself that it was just a kind of gory meltwater. Steeling himself, he moved closer again, and examined the body in greater detail.

After the bleeding stump, the first thing that Paul noticed was more blood, this time on and around the man's lips, as though he had coughed it out. It looked quite recent, although it was no longer red, but had dried to a rusty brown. The next thing was a small droplet of fluid on the man's armoured chest. This fluid was a lurid purple in hue, and had neither dried nor frozen. When Paul rubbed it between his fingers, it felt like a blood clot, and it had a bitter aroma that dissuaded him from trying to taste it. Another droplet had fallen among the fur of the man's cloak, and Paul located two more on the floor of the lab. On a hunch, he examined the autopsy knives. One of them looked as though it had been recently and hurriedly wiped clean, and there was a tiny purple stain on the towel covering the base of the tray.

"Curioser and curioser," Paul said, trying to piece together what had happened here, and failing altogether.

Behind him, the door opened, admitting the Beta Facility's MO, Dr Jonathon Griffin, and his surgical assistant, Technical Sergeant Alice Fry.

"Dr Fairbrass," Griffin greeted him. "I believe your work takes place in Lab 1?"

 _Smug bastard_ , Paul thought, still angry at his ejection from the project. "Yes, Sir," was all he said however. "Here to autopsy our little friend?"

"Not that it's any of your business," Griffin replied, in his superior way. "But yes."

Paul bristled. "It's just that Captain Kawalsky wanted me to make sure you send her a copy of your results," he said.

"I will do," Griffin said, sounding offended.

 _Bull's-eye_ , Paul thought. He knew that Griffin resented being outranked by a woman eight years his junior, and having a civilian relay an order to him added insult to injury. It was a petty blow, but made Paul feel a little better about the bad day he was having. "I'll get out of your hair then," he said, leaving the doctor to his autopsy.

*

"Major Kawalsky; Colonel." Aside from his outfit, the man gave himself away as a civilian by addressing Amy's mother first. At the sound of his voice – gentle, but with a subtle power and richness – Amy looked up from her hands, which she had been studying all through Charlie's memorial service as though they were very important. The man had a face to go with his voice, soft and handsome, a young face leant bearing by his round glasses, but with an unmistakable, steely determination in his blue eyes. Amy's heart flip-flopped in her chest as he caught her gaze and gaze her a sad, supportive smile, and she looked back down at her hands, feeling a blush creep up the back of her neck.

"I'm Dr Daniel Jackson," the man continued. "I was…working with Charles when he died." Behind him, Jack O'Neill coughed discretely, and Daniel Jackson shot him a frown.

"It's alright, Dr Jackson," Amy's father said. "We accepted when Charlie entered special forces that we might one day have to cope without knowing how he died." The old man hid well how hard the death of his eldest son had hit him. At sixty-two, the old soldier had dared to hope that none of his children would die before him. "And please," he added. "Call me Max; this is Angela. Our children are Saras, Matthew, Donohue, Andrew and Amy."

"Rob and Bart couldn't make it?" Jack asked.

"On manoeuvres," Sass – as Saras was always known – replied.

"It's nice to meet you all," Daniel said, although clearly a little intimidated by the row of blue uniforms: Five Air Force officers and a Master Sergeant, Donohue alone in the family having chosen to opt for an enlisted career. Actually, that wasn't quite true; Charlie had begun in the ranks, but he had later taken a degree at the academy and worked his way into the OCS a year behind Sass.

It was probably because she was the only Kawalsky not yet affiliated with the US military-industrial complex that Daniel had spent so much time talking to Amy that afternoon. Amy had never asked, unwilling to look that particular gift horse in the mouth. Everyone else seemed so solemn and serious and awkward, but he was kind and clever and funny, without ever being glib or insensitive.

Perhaps most importantly, surrounded by Air Force personnel Amy felt obliged to act as though she too understood that death was just part of the job, when in fact she was still too young to really accept it. With Daniel however, there was no need to pretend; no need to hide her grief and confusion. He was almost as lost as she was, and she felt able to open up to him. He seemed to understand without her saying that she felt inhibited among her relentlessly pragmatic family, so they walked outside the church, down by the river, where she could mourn her brother the way she needed to.

"It makes me wonder," she admitted. "If I'm really cut out for the military."

"Well, why do you want to join up?" Daniel had asked her.

"It's what I know," she replied. "How I was raised. All I've ever wanted to do was serve my country the best I could."

"And the degree in anthropology?"

Amy smiled. "Well, that's so I have something entirely different to fall back on if I wash out of OCS."

"I don't see that happening," Daniel assured her. "I didn't know Kawalsky long, but one thing I saw about him was that he never phoned it in, or gave anything less than his all; and I don't think he ever let anyone push him into anything he didn't want to do. You seem a lot like him in that respect."

"I don't know," Amy said. "Sometimes I wonder…"

"So did he. So does everyone. If it's what you want to do, you'll do it well. I mean, no-one starts out being able to take a loss like this on the chin. Jack says it gets easier the more you come to accept your own impending death. I think it's also about how they deal with the loss; more than about not being hurt or sad."

The conversation paused awhile.

"So tell me, Daniel Jackson," Amy said, suddenly. "What on Earth is a man like you doing serving with special forces?"

Daniel looked awkward. "I really can't say," he told her.

Amy nodded. "It's okay. You get used to it. Charlie was always very cryptic about his work, although I know he was happy working where he was."

Daniel wiped a tear from his eye. "I miss him," he admitted. "I didn't know him for very long, but I liked him a lot."

Amy looped her arm through Daniel's for mutual support. "I miss him too."

 

Amy opened here eyes and looked around, her dream evaporating. She was huddled in a seat in the passenger section of the SGC's adapted C-17 Globemaster cargo jet, en route from the British base at Port Stanley to Colorado. She checked her watch, and noted that the plane must still be at least two hours from landing. With a soft sigh, she laid her head back down and went to sleep again.

_*_

The next morning, Paul went to see Dr Griffin.

"No, Dr Fairbrass," the MO assured him. "There was nothing unusual about the body; at least not for an ice mummy. You must be starting to imagine things; it's probably for the best that you're leaving us soon."

Paul shook his head in amazement. "You're right," he said. "Besides, being around you is giving me an inferiority complex. I used to think _I_ was full of myself." He turned and left the Doctor's office before Griffin could react to the insult.

 

One of the notable things about a command as small as the Beta Facility was that almost nobody did just a single job. If civvies had not been banished from the current excavation, Paul would have doubled as a digger, and even the MO was also in charge of what they liked to call ‘combat weather'. Every morning at eleven, and every evening at ten, he would take a series of routine weather and status reports to be relayed to whatever airbase controlled this operation. As Sergeant Fry was primarily the facility's quartermaster, almoner and cook, this meant that for about fifteen minutes in the late morning, no-one was in the MO's office.

Paul hovered in the door of Lab 1, watching the corridor for Dr Griffin to leave on his way to the radio shack. Once he was gone, Paul slipped out, and down to the Doctor's office. None of the doors in the Beta Facility had locks, so gaining entry was as easy as opening the door. The filing cabinets were harder, but a misspent youth finally paid its dividends, and Paul was able to finagle the locks and get at the autopsy report.

Paul skimmed through the pages, picking out anything that looked unusual. ‘Abnormal preservation' immediately suggested itself, and Griffin had listed the time of death at around five hours before the autopsy. Paul frowned; that meant that the man had apparently died at the time when he had heard the crash from Lab 2. _What on Earth could that mean_? He wondered.

A final note had been underlined: ‘Goa'uld symbiote of prodigious size coiled around brain stem and spinal column. Preservation suggests recent death. Symbiote will be removed and preserved for transportation to SGC'.

Paul slipped the file back into the cabinet and headed for the door. As he reached for the handle, someone turned it on the other side of the door. Panic gripped Paul, but only for a moment, and he realised that any attempt to conceal his presence would be not merely futile, but incredibly suspect. He tried to think of an explanation that would satisfy Dr Griffin, but when the door opened, it was not the Doctor standing there, but Sergeant Fry.

"Gah!" Fry snapped, clearly not expecting to find a palaeogeologist skulking in the MO's office with the lights off. "What are you doing in here?" She demanded, not unreasonably.

"Looking for you," Paul replied, going with the first idea to enter his head.

"For me?"

"Yes," he confirmed.

"Why?" She asked.

"Good question," he admitted.

"What?"

"Because," he blustered. "I'm leaving next week, and I've never really had the chance to get to know you."

"Huh?" Now the Tech Sergeant really did look baffled.

"Well," Paul said, by now fully committed to his ill-considered course. "You are a very attractive woman."

"Oh," Fry said. She blushed, and got a look on her face that suggested she did not hear that very often. "That's…very kind of you. I…" Her eyes narrowed, suspiciously. "Hang on! You were chasing around after Captain Kawalsky last thing I heard."

"Oh, yeah," Paul said, with a sinking feeling in his gut. _The jig is up_ , he thought.

"That is so low!" She accused, indignantly. "Kawalsky blows you off and the next day you're hitting on me? Man, that sucks!"

"I should…go now?" Paul suggested, somewhat relieved. His name was going to be mud on this base, but at least Fry had not tumbled to his spying.

Fry's eyes blazed like thunder. "You should keep the hell out of my sight from here on in, mister," she suggested.

"Right. I'll do that then."

Paul scurried away, blushing like a beetroot and feeling like a heel. "That could have gone worse," he admitted. "Although not by much." He sighed, and turned his mind back to more important matters. "Now what the hell is a Goa'uld symbiote? And what – or where – is SGC?"

*

Amy stopped her rented car, and took a long, hard look at the towering peak of Cheyenne Mountain. Some eighteen thousand feet below the summit lay the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, housing the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Centre – home to NORAD, as well as United States Space Command – and below that the Stargate Command. When she left the Mountain for the airfield and a flight to Antarctica she had looked back at the same view and said goodbye to Daniel's memory. This was the first time she had been on this spot in almost three months, but the view had remained in her mind, and so had Daniel.

After a moment, Amy continued along the road, driving up to the Main Gate, where the guards checked her clearance and waved her through. From the car park, she entered the mountain itself, passing through the massive blast doors into the great, artificial cavern. Once through the doors, she walked past the free-standing buildings of the CMOC, to the elevators which would carry her down to the sub-levels of the complex. Another set of guards inspected her ID, and called down to confirm her authorisation, before allowing her to proceed, and yet another challenged her as she exited the elevator.

As Amy made her way towards the SGC archaeology labs, a tall man stepped around the corner and almost collided with her.

"Whoa!" He cried. "Careful…Kawalsky?"

"Colonel O'Neill," Amy responded, guardedly.

Jack frowned in concern. "How you doing?" He asked.

"I'm well," she assured him. "Thank you for asking, Sir."

Jack gave a rueful grimace. "Still pissed at me, huh?" He nodded. "Seems to go for a lot of people around here."

Amy shrugged. "Was there anything else, Sir?" She asked. "Only I have some work to do, and I'd like to get started."

"Yeah; sure," Jack agreed. "You…keep on working hard." He watched as the young Captain walked on down the corridor, haunted by the pallor of her skin and the thinness of her face; and by the emptiness of her dark eyes.

 

In the lab, Amy looked for the Caduceus, but found no trace of it, despite the assurance of the Special Quartermaster that it would be delivered within a day. She slammed her fist onto one of the workbenches in frustration, then checked the records to see if anyone had already unpacked the item and put it into storage.

"Amy?"

Amy turned to face Louise. "Hi," she said. "Have there been any deliveries from Dreamlands today?"

Louise made a face. "Hey, Louise; how've you been," she suggested. "Not bad, thanks; how about you, Amy?"

Amy smiled, repentantly. "Sorry," she sighed. "Long flight. And I'm…still plodding along, day by day." She paused. "Has…"

"Not a thing," Louise replied with a soft laugh. "But there was an autopsy report faxed from Antarctica. Good to see you're not letting your work ethic slide, anyway." The telephone rang with an internal call, and Louise answered. "Arc lab. Hmm; hang on a moment." She held out the receiver to Amy. "I think this is for you."

Amy took the handset with a grateful nod. "Kawalsky," she said.

"Oh," Sam Carter's voice came, thin and tinny down the wire. "Now there's a voice I wasn't expecting to hear. What brings you back to sunny Colorado?"

"Work," Amy replied with a smile. "What else, Ma'am?"

"Naturally," Sam agreed. "So is this your box from Area 51?"

Amy breathed a sigh of relief. "It's arrived?"

"Sitting on my table if you want to come and fetch it," Sam confirmed.

"Great," Amy replied. "I'll be right over."

*

"Griffin!"

"Dr Fairbrass," Griffin said, impatiently, as he turned to face the younger man. "Have you come up with another way to waste my time? Or are you just looking for a few lessons in pomposity?"

"What's a Goa'uld symbiote?"

Griffin's face contorted in anger. "You've been looking in my files," he accused.

"Yes; I know that. What's a Goa'uld symbiote, and what the hell did it do to Amy? What's this SGC you're sending the thing to?"

"It did nothing to Captain Kawalsky," Griffin assured him. "Not that it's any of your concern, but a Goa'uld symbiote is a rare variety of cancerous growth. SGC is Saranov-Getty Cancer, a privately funded institute working with this kind of growth. The sample is unusually well-preserved, so with the Colonel's permission I was going to send it for examination."

"Bollocks," Paul replied.

"It is my professional opinion that this work has become far too much for you, Dr Fairbrass." Griffin turned away. "Try to get some sleep."

"I'm not finished with…" Paul grabbed the Doctor by the shoulder and turned him around, but Griffin drove a solid punch into his midriff that knocked the wind right out of him. Then he walked away and left Paul to fold slowly to the floor. "Note to self," he gasped. "Air Force physicians are soldiers as well as doctors."

"You're just pissing everybody off today, aren't you?"

Paul raised his head to look at Sergeant Fry, who was standing over him. "It's a talent," he gasped.

"Seems so," she said, reaching down and pulling him to his feet. "Now I assume you weren't hitting on Dr Griffin, so I'm going out on a limb and guessing you weren't really hitting on me either."

"I was looking through medical files," Paul admitted. "Sorry."

Fry's brow furrowed. "Why?" She demanded.

"Something was up with that corpse we excavated," he said. "And now something's up with Amy." Paul sighed. "You're going to tell me I'm imagining it; nothing to see here?"

"Well, on current evidence of your infectious charm, Amy might just have been pissed at you."

"No," Paul insisted. "We were fine. I asked her out, she said no, I backed off; before she saw the body everything was fine. Well," he admitted. "As fine as anything ever was with Amy. But afterwards she started acting funny. She was always reserved, but she became almost introverted; she didn't seem to want to speak to anyone, or spend time around them."

"That wasn't new," Fry assured him. "You were about the only person ever talked to her anyway."

"There's more though," he insisted. "There was blood on the floor, I know there was; and on the corpse's lips. Then there was the knife."

"The knife?"

"Yes. It looked like she'd cut something with one of the autopsy knives; something that leaked purple fluid."

"Purple…?" Fry suddenly looked terribly afraid. "Come on," she said.

"What?"

Fry started off down the corridor. "We need to take another look at the bodies."

"Bodies?" Paul was confused by the plural, but followed Fry anyway.

 

The man had been stripped and sliced open, his possessions neatly arranged on a second table for cataloguing. Among them was a tall metal cylinder.

"That wasn't with him," Paul said, with certainty.

"Of course not," Fry replied. "It's just a storage tube." She grabbed the cylinder and swung it up to a workbench, while Paul perused the artefacts.

"Hang on," he said, picking up the caduceus pendant.

Fry twisted the end of the cylinder, which released with a sharp hiss. "What?"

Paul held up the bronze amulet. "This is Amy's. The one the man was wearing was made of a different metal."

The Tech Sergeant's frown deepened. "Well, that doesn't bode well," she said, as she lifted away the outer casing of the storage tube. "Now let's have a look at this little fella."

"What _is_ that?" Paul asked, horrified. "Some kind of sea-snake?"

"Something like that."

"Let me guess; you can't tell me?"

"You really think I'm attractive?" Fry asked, lugging the cylinder over to the sink and draining the pale fluid which held the sinuous creature in suspension.

"Subtle change of subject," Paul commended. Fry gave no response, focused on the creature as she tipped it onto the table beside the body. "Yes, you are attractive," he said. "And I'm very sorry for lying to you, but please; tell me what this thing is?"

Fry looked up at him, relenting. "You understand you can never tell anyone…"

"Yes, yes; I understand," Paul replied. "I signed the bloody non-disclosure agreement, didn't I?"

"No need to be so sensitive about it," Fry told him. "It's not personal."

"Yes it is," Paul insisted. "Because it's me that's being called a liar. I knew what I was doing when I signed on that dotted line. I said I'd never tell in about a hundred different ways, and it would be nice to feel that meant something to _someone_ around here!"

Fry laughed. "You broke into the medical officer's confidential files," she reminded him.

"Well, yeah," Paul admitted, sheepishly. "But maybe if everyone wasn't being so damn X-Files about everything I wouldn't have had to."

Fry nodded. "This is what was wrapped around his spine," she told him, gesturing to corpse. "An alien parasite, controlling his body; while he was alive, anyway."

"But it was still there? So it didn't do anything to Amy; did it?"

"I don't know," Fry replied. "There was something I heard about, but I'll need to take a look inside."

*

Sam looked up from her workbench as Amy entered, making straight for the crate. "Hey stranger!" She called. "How've you been?"

"I've had better times," Amy replied, absently.

Sam grimaced, knowing it had been a stupid question, but not sure what else to ask. She was not the SGC's finest people person, and with her own feelings over Daniel's death still deeply conflicted, she was far from the best person to try and talk to Amy. Sam had, in fact, told Colonel O'Neill that very thing five minutes ago, when he had asked her to have a word with the young officer; had tried to explain that Daniel had always been better at the ‘girl talk' than she was. Jack had been having none of it.

Sam tried again, walking towards Amy. "So what was Antarctica like?"

"Cold."

"I remember," Sam agreed. _Another stupid question_. "Have you found anything interesting down…" She broke off, as a sick feeling twisted her gut. If Amy noticed the flinch, or the look of horror that flitted across Sam's face in its wake, she made no sign. Never taking her eyes from Amy, Sam moved quietly to a locker on the wall.

"Some paving," Amy replied. "Strange iconography, but I think I recognised it. Do you have a caw hammer or a crowbar?"

"On my bench," Sam told her, reaching into the locker.

"Thanks."

Amy crossed in front of Sam, who did her best to keep her hands hidden until the Captain's back was turned. Amy reached for the bar, but suddenly froze. "Clever," she whispered.

As fast as she could, Sam raised the zat'nik'tel she had taken from the weapons locker and fired. Amy was already turning, and as she came about she raised her hand, palm outward. It would have been a futile gesture of defiance, except for the fact that the air in front of Amy rippled, and the zat blast was deflected away from her. A second shot was similarly dismissed, and Amy's eyes burned with white fire.

Sam's eyes widened. "How…?" She began, before a shockwave rolled out of Amy's palm and slammed her against the wall of the phys lab. She dropped the zat, and lay stunned and winded as Amy – or rather, the Goa'uld who looked like Amy – kicked the weapon out of her reach. Sam braced herself for the follow-up strike, the killing blow, but it never came.

Instead, the Goa'uld turned and walked back to the crate. Abandoning pretence, she tore off the lid with her bare hands, and lifted out the caduceus staff, scattering packing foam all across the floor. "At last," she whispered.

"Amy," Sam gasped. "You've got to fight. We can help you, but only if you fight it."

The Goa'uld laughed, bitterly. "The girl is strong; but not that strong," she told Sam.

"You can't escape," Sam said. "You will be caught, and we _will_ get her back."

The Goa'uld took a pendant from around her neck, and fitted it into a circular socket in the swastika at the crown of the staff. "You overestimate your defences," she assured Sam. "But you are right about one thing. I shall return Captain Kawalsky to you, unharmed, once I am finished with her." She held up the staff, and it began to glow; softly at first, but gathering in intensity.

"What is that?" Sam asked, curious in spite of her fear.

"My destiny," the Goa'uld replied, turning to leave.

"You're not going to kill me?" Sam could not quite believe that she had asked that question.

"I mean no harm to anyone here," the Goa'uld replied. "I mean no harm to anyone at all. I merely need to use the Stargate."

Sam had to ask: "Who are you?"

The Goa'uld looked down at her with curiously gentle eyes. "I am Thoth."

*

General Hammond sat in his office, listening with almost saintly patience as Jack O'Neill outlined his problem.

"I just don't think it would work out," the Colonel was saying.

"Jack," Hammond replied. "Captain Kawalsky has worked successfully with your team on several, very high pressure assignments. There was no real problem with conflict of interest there; I don't see why there should be now."

"Don't get me wrong, Sir," Jack said. "Kawalsky's a great kid…"

"She's a lot more than that," Hammond reminded him. "She's a decorated Air Force Captain."

"Yes, she is," Jack agreed. "But she also hates me right about now; she doesn't seem to have forgiven me for letting Daniel go. Despite her qualifications, and her previously exemplary working record with the team, I don't think she's the right person to replace Daniel on SG-1."

"She'll calm down," Hammond assured Jack.

"Not if she's working on SG-1," Jack insisted. "I mean, believe me; I'd love to have her on board. She knows her stuff, she's a quick study, and little would make me happier than having a cultural expert I know I can trust on my six in a fire fight. But I think it would be wrong for her to try and fill Daniel's shoes."

"Perhaps you're right," Hammond accepted. "But we're still running out of candidates for transfer to SG-1."

"We're doing fine as it is, General," Jack promised.

"Maybe, but…" One of the phone on the General's desk rang. "One moment," he told Jack, lifting the receiver. "Hammond. Yes. Put her through." There was a short pause. "Yes, Sergeant; what's the emergency?"

Jack leaned closer, straining to hear the tinny, female voice from the far end of the line, but could make nothing out but the General's clipped responses.

"Yes. Where? Who?" Hammond looked up from the phone. "Colonel," he said. "Put the base on full alert, and I want Amy Kawalsky confined for examination. She may be infested with a Goa'uld."

*

Jack and Teal'c burst into the archaeology lab, but found only Louise working there. A light from Daniel's…from the office indicated that Jonas Quinn was within.

"Kawalsky?" Jack asked.

Louise looked up from her work. "She went down to the physics lab to pick up a shipment from Area…" She trailed off as the two men ran out again. "You're welcome!" She called after them.

Halfway to the lab, they ran into Sam. She was moving slowly, but seemed to have suffered no lasting harm. She was clutching a zat gun as she limped along.

"Where's Kawalsky?" Jack demanded.

"Heading for the Gateroom," Sam replied. "I told security to lock it down. She's…"

"We know," Jack assured her, as they turned and fell into line with Sam. "What happened?"

"She knocked me down, took an artefact and left. She said that she was Thoth," Sam added.

"Thoth?" Teal'c asked.

"You know the guy?" Jack asked.

"Only by reputation," the Jaffa replied. "He was said to be a Goa'uld of unparalleled intellect and wisdom; one of the few genuine scientists among them. However, he disappeared millennia ago; if he ever existed."

"He was one of the Goa'uld that Nefera described as ‘legends'." Sam shook her head. "I'm going to go out on a limb though, and say he's for real. I fired on Amy and she waved the blasts aside and knocked me down."

"That is merely a use of the hand device," Teal'c told her. "We have seen it many times."

"True," Sam agreed. "Except that Amy didn't _have_ a hand device. Whoever Thoth is, he must have found a way to perform the kind of energy manipulations used by Goa'uld technology using only the naquada in his – or her – blood, without the need for external effectors or power sources."

"Okay," Jack said. "That's bad."

Teal'c nodded. "Indeed."

Thoth rounded the corner before the Gateroom door. The heavy blast door was closed, and four armed guards stood before it, weapons levelled.

"Freeze!" The lead airman commanded. "Drop your weapon and surrender!"

Thoth held out her hand, and the guards were battered aside, falling unconscious to the floor of the passage. Then she walked to the door, and raised a hand to the override keypad. Her brow furrowed in concentration for a moment, and then she entered a code, and the door slid slowly open.

"The less you fight me, the easier this will be," she said, apparently talking to herself.

 _I don't plan to make this easy_ , Amy told her, the voice speaking in her mind.

"I meant for you," Thoth assured her. Feet pounded along the corridor as she stepped through the door. She turned, raising the staff, and the opening was barred by a pale sheet of light. Amy could just about make out movement behind the barrier, but nothing specific.

_What is that?_

"A force field," Thoth replied. "Luckily, I can afford to expend a little of the staff's reserves." The second door began to open, but another gesture raised a force field across that entrance as well. At almost the same moment, the iris slid closed over the Gate.

"Attention, Thoth." General Hammond's voice echoed through the Gateroom, and the Goa'uld turned to face the windows of the control room. "We will not allow you to depart with our officer. If you surrender, you have my guarantee that you will be sent to any friendly world; without Captain Kawalsky of course."

"No world is friendly to me, General," Thoth replied. "Although I thank you for your offer."

"We do not wish to harm our officer," Hammond continued. "But if we have to we will not hesitate to fire on you. There's no way out; surrender now."

Thoth bowed low. "You care deeply for your subordinates," she noted. "And they for you. It is an honour to have met such a wise commander."

 

"You can't hold out against us forever," Hammond insisted, as the Goa'uld turned away from the observation window.

"Sir," Sam suggested. "If we can't get through her forcefields, we might be able to have the Russians send a team through their Gate, then open the iris so that they can assault the Gateroom from the other side."

Hammond nodded. "Sergeant Davis; contact the Russian…"

"Ah…General," Jack said. He was standing at the bullet-proof window, looking over the Gateroom and nursing a burn on his forearm where he had run into Thoth's defence field. Teal'c stood beside him, grim-faced.

Hammond and Sam hurried to join them, and saw the Goa'uld standing before the Gate, the caduceus staff raised in both hands. The pale glow from the artefact grew more and more intense, and powerful arcs of energy cracked and hissed around both the staff and the woman who held it. A great flash filled the Gateroom, and a twisting streamer of light leaped to join the staff to the chevron at the top of the Gate.

"General Hammond," Sergeant Davis said. "The iris is opening."

"Override!"

"I can't sir; the energy surge seems to have fused all of the control circuits. We can still monitor the Gate's condition, but we can't actually do anything to it."

"The Stargate is dialling," Teal'c observed.

"Davis?" Hammond asked for confirmation.

"Yes, Sir," the technician replied. "First Chevron is holding now. Chevron One encoded."

"Carter," Jack said. "If you're going to have one of your patented sudden bursts of inspiration, now would be the time."

"Chevron Two encoded," Davis announced, and in the Gateroom a second streamer leaped to the next chevron.

Sam wracked her brains. "I don't know, Sir; I…"

"Chevron Three encoded."

"Carter?"

"Well, Sir," Sam began.

"Chevron Four encoded."

"If the staff is maintaining the force fields, they should shut down as soon as the Goa'uld passes through the wormhole and the event horizon closes behind her."

"Chevron Five encoded."

"Once we get inside, I can jury rig the control circuits and Sergeant Davis can dial up the same destination. Hopefully we can take Thoth by surprise."

"Chevron Six encoded."

"General?" Jack asked.

"You have a go," Hammond replied. "Take the airmen waiting at the force fields with you, just in case."

"Yes, Sir." The three members of SG-1 turned to go, but Sergeant Davis' next words froze them in place.

"Chevron Seven _encoded_."

"Encoded?" Sam asked. "Damnit; that's an intergalactic address. We can't dial that without the Ancient's energy booster."

"And we left that in a different universe," Jack finished.

"Well, Sir," Sam said, sheepishly. "Actually I made another one."

Jack looked at Sam.

"I just don't know if it'll work," she admitted. "It was kind of a personal project, so we've never had the chance for a test."

"I'm not sure that matters, Ma'am," Davis said. "Chevron eight just encoded."

"Hoo boy," Jack whispered. Now there were eight ribbons of energy tying the staff to the Stargate.

"We may still have time to follow the Goa'uld through the Gate before it closes," Sam suggested.

Hammond frowned. "Would you be able to get back?"

"Chevron Nine…is encoded."

"That's impossible," Sam insisted. "There are only nine chevrons on the Gate. How can it engage without a point of origin?"

"It hasn't…" Davis broke off, as the light from the Gateroom dimmed dramatically. Jack saw that the streamers had vanished, although the chevrons still held a soft glow.

"Sergeant?" Hammond asked.

It was Sam who replied. "Sir; all nine chevrons just disengaged, and have now locked. Six of them are holding the Gate address for Earth; one the point of origin. The eighth is holding the intergalactic code which Colonel O'Neill used to travel to the Asgard homeworld."

"So she's going to Ida?" Jack asked.

"Maybe," Sam replied. "Or maybe that's like a point of origin as well; a galactic origin. I just don't know enough about intergalactic Gate travel. The ninth symbol I've never seen in any special context."

"Seems to have done the trick though," Jack noted, as the Stargate opened.

"Are we tracking the wormhole?" General Hammond asked.

"I think so, Sir," Davis replied. "But…"

"Sergeant?"

"It's not going anywhere."

In the Gateroom, Thoth turned and raised the staff in salute. Then she took Amy's body and walked up the ramp. Moments after she had stepped through the event horizon, the Gate shut down, and the force fields collapsed.

"Gate control circuits are back on line," Davis announced, as baffled airmen poured through the blast doors. "All systems read normal."

"Major Carter," Hammond said, grimly.

"Sir?"

"I want to know how the hell a Goa'uld managed to seize all control of the Gate from us using a stick."

"Yes, Sir," Sam replied, distractedly. Hammond followed her gaze to where Jack and Teal'c were still staring into the Gateroom.

"And find me a way to dial that Gate address; whatever the hell it meant. I want my officer back."

*

The wormhole was brighter than usual, the light from the stars that they passed almost dazzling. When they emerged, the light was still there, still bright, but not painful at all. She looked around her, and saw great lawns stretching away form her, with hedgerows and trees, great fountains of multicoloured stone, and in the distance a city of breathtaking beauty. Great spires and buttresses could be discerned, even so far away, the stone of their construction shining white, emerald and topaz in the soft sunlight.

 _Where are we_ , Amy thought.

"Ultima Thule," Thoth replied. "Greatest city of the Ancients. Or one of its parks anyway."

_The Ancients? But…what world is this?_

"Earth. In a manner of speaking. Or perhaps all worlds, in a different manner. I have reached my destination," the Goa'uld said. "And, as I promised, I release you, Amy Kawalsky." Thoth raised the staff before her once more, and the light shone out. This time, the streamers of energy wrapped not around the Gate, but around Amy herself, and she felt them pass around her and through her, and flow into the creature coiled around the base of her brain.

 _What is happening_? Amy demanded, panicking as she caught sight of her hand, her skin glowing with a brilliant white light. _What are you…_ "…doing?" She finished, the words breaking from her lips as a luminous cloud rose from her body and hovered above her.

Tentatively, Amy tried to raise her arm, and it complied. She breathed a sigh of relief, glad to be back in her own body. She let the staff, which had turned completely black, fall to the ground, where it disintegrated into a pile of ash.

She looked at the cloud, as it slowly lowered itself back to ground level, and resolved into a humanoid figure. It was a man; the man who had been Thoth's previous host. The sun was behind Amy's shoulder as she faced him, yet still he seemed to be lit from behind; or perhaps from within.

"Who…? What are you?"

"I am Thoth," the man replied. "Or I am he that was Thoth."

"You…" A chill ran up her spine. "You ascended."

"Yes," Thoth acknowledged.

"No!" Amy insisted. "That's impossible. Only the good can ascend."

Thoth smiled, gently. "Actually," he told her. "Good and evil have very little to do with it. Ascension is about _awareness_ , understanding of one's self and the universe, and the way the two fit together. Although to be fair, your comprehension of good does fit quite closely with the requirements of ascension."

Amy shook her head. "How can a Goa'uld ascend?" She demanded. "You're evil!"

"You felt me in your mind," Thoth told her. "Did I seem evil?"

"You might have deceived me," Amy replied, although she had not sensed any trace of malice in him, and he had spared Sam's life.

"It was not an easy journey for me," he admitted. "Usually, ascension requires the assistance of one already in that state, but the Others denied me such assistance because of my past deeds. They said that if I truly wished ascension, I must seek it myself. This staff was the culmination of my path, yet at the moment of my completion my heating devices failed, and I was frozen before I could finish dialling the address to transfer me to Ultima Thule."

"Why not use the Giza Gate?" Amy asked.

"I had only the coordinates for the Earth Stargate, and I required the original Gate. The ability to open a wormhole to Thule was built into a handful of Gates in the system in a very specific fashion; the replacement Gate did not have this function. They did not include that…optional extra," he added.

Amy sat down on the ground. "So if this is Ultima Thule, where are the Ancients?"

"Long gone," Thoth sighed. "Only echoes such as this city remain of them; at least in our part of the universe."

As he spoke, Amy looked around, and she saw that the grass of the lawns was long and untended, the fountains overgrown and the distant towers cracked and uneven. Even in this state of decay, the place was more beautiful than anything Amy had ever imagined, and she almost wept for the beauty that must once have been.

Behind them, the Stargate thundered into life, the event horizon forming without the usual aqueous fanfare. From the rippling surface stepped a woman, who bore the same inner light as Thoth. She was dark-skinned and raven-haired, and had a breathtaking, almost ethereal quality that transcended physical beauty.

"Hello, Amy," the woman said, fixing her with great, dark eyes that held only kindness.

"Ma'at," Amy whispered, somehow knowing instinctively who the woman must be. Ma'at, the wife of Thoth; the personification of truth and order.

"You know me," Ma'at said, sounding flattered. Then she turned her face to Thoth, and a radiant smile appeared on her face. "My love," she said. "At long last."

The two figures came together and embraced, and Amy could feeling Thoth's aching love for Ma'at as though it were her own. She realised then that she now had Thoth's memories, or some of them at least; as Sam's mind held the last fragments of the Tok'ra, Jolinar of Malkshur. Thus Amy knew that Ma'at was not and never had been Goa'uld, but a human woman; a mystic whose wisdom Thoth had once sought to control. Somehow, Ma'at had fallen in love with Thoth, but in spite of her feelings had refused to aid his oppressive reign. In return, Thoth had fallen in love with his prisoner, but had struggled against his gentler nature and resisted his feelings. He had kept her confined, until at last one of the Others came to her. She ascended, and so escaped her captivity, leaving Thoth to think her dead.

Moved by her sacrifice and bitterly regretting the pride that had kept them apart, Thoth had set the first foot on the Great Path followed by the Others. His road had been longer than most, but in time he began to abandon many practices of the Goa'uld; most importantly the use of the sarcophagus. Next he elected to take only willing hosts, and made it his place to learn as much as he could about each of those who shared his life. At about this time, Ma'at had appeared to her beloved and encouraged his quest; she would have aided him to ascension there and then, but was forbidden by the Others.

Thoth's last host, Hermes, was to have gone his own way after Thoth's ascension, but events conspired against them and he was trapped for many thousands of years, before the SGC dug him up, and he gained the chance to complete his path.

"I was not a willing host," Amy accused.

"Of that I am aware," Thoth replied, turning to face her. "And I am sorry for it. I took you at first out of fear," he explained. "Hermes was dying, and I hoped that I might find a willing host later. But then I felt your pain, and I believed that I could help you."

"How?" Amy asked.

"Amy?"

Amy spun around in shock, and stared dumbly at the figure standing before the Gate. Like his companions, he was lit from within, but he was undeniably Daniel.

"Daniel." Amy said nothing else, not trusting herself to keep her composure, and not wishing to break down in front of a Goa'uld.

Daniel looked up at the couple standing nearby. "So," he said to Amy. "I'm gone for…how long is it for you?"

"Three months."

"Is that all?" He asked. "Wow. I'm gone three months and you get yourself infested?"

"I didn't mean to," Amy protested.

"She put up a valiant struggle," Thoth assured Daniel. "I have never encountered such a fighter before."

"Much good it did me," Amy demurred.

"She managed to bury her knowledge of Major Carter's ability to sense the presence of a Goa'uld," Thoth told Daniel. "She also used my lack of experience with Tau'ri computing systems to misdirect a crate, so that she could be certain of encountering Major Carter at the SGC, and concealed that from me as well. Had I not sensed the traces of naquada in Major Carter's blood, I should have been captured."

"Is Sam alright?" Daniel asked, concerned.

"She is well," Thoth assured him. "I knocked her down, nothing more."

"How did you do that?" Amy asked.

Thoth smiled. "Much Goa'uld technology is designed to focus the energy which builds in the naquada carried in our bloodstream. It is possible to learn to focus that energy without devices, although most Goa'uld lack the discipline."

"And the staff?"

"Far beyond Goa'uld technology," Thoth assured her. "Or that of the Tollan or Asgard."

"Ancient tech," Amy guessed. "It interfaces directly with the Stargate; that's why they couldn't override you."

"I constructed the staff myself, but basically you are correct," Thoth acknowledged. He crouched down, and dug through the ashes until he found the naquada amulet. "A keepsake," he said, dusting it off and hanging it around Amy's neck. "When you know what it means, how it works; you will be ready to join us. I doubt you'll need a staff though," he added, looking at Daniel. "I wouldn't think that you'll have much difficulty in finding someone who deems you worthy."

"Be kind," Ma'at told her lover. "She knew me on sight, remember. I would be honoured to sponsor you," she assured Amy. "When the time is right."

"Wait," Amy said. "You're talking about…ascension. I don't know…I mean, I'm not…"

Ma'at smiled, kindly. "Of course not," she replied. "But some day you may be ready. Until that day, I will bid you farewell. I am certain that you will wish to talk without us hanging over you, and my husband and I have things to…discuss."

"Quite," Thoth agreed. "It has been a pleasure, Amy Kawalsky. I hope that we shall meet again some day."

"It's been…interesting," Amy replied. "You two take care now."

The Gate splashed open, and Thoth and Ma'at went through, hand in hand. The wormhole closed, and Amy turned back to Daniel.

"So," she said. "Hi."

 "Hi," Daniel replied. "How've you been?" He added, lamely.

Amy's eyes began to shine with tears. "You left me," she accused, plaintively.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"You lied to me," Amy said, in a quavering voice. "You lied to me so I never had a chance to say goodbye. You said, ‘ten or eleven days'."

"I thought it was better that way," he explained. "I didn't want you to see me like that."

Amy choked back a sob, almost as angry as she was upset. "Did you think I wouldn't be able to take it?" She demanded. "Losing you was always going to be hard, but to be made to feel like you didn't want me there at the end…You were surrounded by your friends, and I wasn't one of them; how do you think _that_ made me feel?"

"Amy…"

"I got up the next day and found out you'd turned into a ball of light," Amy went on, ignoring his protests. "And Jack told me that you'd asked to be let go. God, I _hated_ him! I hated that he'd told them to just allow you to die. I hated not being able to get you out of my system because you hadn't let me be there to close the book. I _hated_ not really knowing what had happened to you. And I…I hated _you_ for running out on me." She sat heavily on the ground, tears flowing freely now. "I _hated_ you," she repeated.

"Amy." Daniel knelt beside her, and hesitantly put his arms around her.  "I'm so sorry," he said. "I thought…I was trying to do what was best, but I…No; shh," he said, as Amy began to shake in his arms. "Please don't…" He frowned, a sudden realisation striking him. "Are you laughing at me?"

Amy looked into his eyes, still crying, but laughing at the same time. "You've transcended your mortal form," she said. "Shaken off the shackles of the material world and become a being of a higher order; but you're still as awkward as ever when a woman starts getting emotional about you." She smiled. "I just find that kind of funny."

Daniel chuckled, softly. "I guess it is," he replied.

"I missed you _so_ much," Amy said. "And I didn't know how to deal. I had to get away from the Mountain because I kept expecting you to be coming back through the Stargate."

Daniel sighed. "I'm not coming back," he told her. "I'm not…dead, but I can't come back; not really."

Amy managed a smile. "Now you tell me?"

"Sorry," Daniel said again.

Amy looked him in the eyes. "Thank you."

"I…I should have trusted your strength," he admitted. "But I wanted to protect you."

Amy touched his face, and it felt slightly unreal against her palm; not quite like skin. "Sometimes I needed your help in a tight spot," she told him. "But I never needed you to protect me."

"I know," Daniel agreed. "But I always remembered that girl from the funeral."

Amy leaned her head against Daniel's shoulder. "You feel strange," she told him.

"This body is just an illusion," he told her. "And I'm not so good at it yet."

Amy smiled. "Well, it looks pretty good," she said. "Daniel?" She asked, suddenly serious again. "Do you think you would ever have loved me? If we'd had time?"

Daniel was quiet for a long time. "You remember I told you about the dream that Shifu gave me," he said at last.

"Yes," Amy replied, nervously. Daniel had described the visions which the Harcesis had created to teach him that the knowledge of the Goa'uld could not be used for good, and it had chilled her to the bone.

"What I didn't tell you, was that you were in that dream."

"I was?"

Daniel nodded. "With Apophis' knowledge we rooted out Keyes' conspiracy and brought you back. I requested that you be assigned to the project, because I knew that you would trust me, and do whatever I told you without question because of that trust."

"Gee, thanks," Amy muttered, but without real bitterness.

"One month later," Daniel continued. "I had one of my aides cut the brakes on your car. You ran off the road and were killed."

"What?" Amy was horrified. "Why?"

"The same reason I isolated myself from Sam and Jack, and had Teal'c killed," Daniel explained. "The same reason I found a way to mutate Nirrti's retrovirus in such a way that Janet had to quit the Air Force to spend her whole life caring for Cassie. Because I knew what I had to do, and that certain people could stop me; not by their actions but by their opinions. Because every time I looked into your eyes, I found myself questioning everything I had set out to do. I wanted to use your trust to control you, but instead…it controlled me."

"So you killed me?" Amy asked.

"I had someone else do it," he replied. "Like I had someone else kill Teal'c, and sign the forms to have Sam put away. Like I created the formula that would transform Cassie's illness, but left it to someone else to switch it for the sleepers Janet was using to keep her calm.

"These were things that I just couldn't do with my own hands, even as I was in that dream."

"Wow."

Daniel drew away from Amy, and looked into her eyes. "I love you," he said. "Like I love Sam, and Jack and Teal'c; and Janet and Cassie as well. I always have loved you. I just couldn't love you the way you wanted me to, and that tore me up inside. Sometimes I almost gave in," he admitted, with a trace of self-loathing. "I was tempted to pretend to be what you needed, just to have someone to be that close to."

"Why didn't you?" Amy asked.

"It wouldn't have been fair to you. You wanted…you deserved so much more."

"I would have taken what I could get," she insisted.

"You would have been miserable," he told her. "And I couldn't do that to you."

Amy sighed. "My life would have been so much simpler if you were a worthless, user bastard."

"Um…Thank you, Amy," Daniel said. "I never get tired of hearing that."

Amy beamed. "Still my Daniel." She lifted the pendant and examined the symbol on its face. "So this is the key to my enlightenment?" She asked.

"In a manner of speaking."

"Can I get a hint?"

Daniel smiled. "I'll give you two," he offered. "The first is that it's not about what it does, or is, but what it means."

Amy nodded, sharply. "Check. Meaning."

"The second is that you mustn't bury yourself in trying to work it out." He fixed her gaze with his once more. "If you lock out the world, and spend your whole time obsessing over a little amulet, then you'll never understand what it means."

"This is what Thoth meant about understanding the world, and how you fit into it," Amy realised.

Daniel nodded. "We all touch each other's lives, and where we do is the only place that we can really see what kind of person we are."

Amy frowned. "Didn't you once tell me that the true test of a person is the conflict between the conscious and subconscious?"

"Oh, it is," Daniel assured her. "But the way we interact with other people; that's the scoreboard. That's why I had to get rid of all of you and hire a pack of sycophants when I wanted to give way to my subconscious in the dream. They showed me what I wanted to see, so that I didn't have to see what I had become. With you, I'd always seen the truth; that I was losing my light." He smiled. "I think that's why Ma'at likes you; you have truth in your soul."

Amy blushed. "So…what happens now?" She asked.

Daniel smiled an angelic smile. "It's time to go home," he said, kissing her gently on the forehead.

*

"Good morning, Captain Kawalsky."

"Teal'c?" Amy tried to sit up, but her head felt heavy with sleep and her guts felt as though she had not eaten in a month. "What are you doing in my bedroom?" She tried to think back, and found that the last thing she remembered was Daniel kissing her brow; then this.

"You are in the Air Force Academy hospital, Captain Kawalsky," Teal'c informed her. "SG-1 and SG-11 have been taking turns to sit by you since your return three weeks ago."

"Three…I've been out three weeks?" Amy was startled, although it explained the hollow feeling in her stomach.

"Possibly longer," the Jaffa said. "You were missing for over a month. I shall inform the others that you have woken."

"Thank you," Amy replied.

The Jaffa rose and walked to the door, and Amy felt the pressure in her gut slacken. By the entrance, Teal'c turned. "Are you well, Captain Kawalsky?" He asked.

"Yeah," she replied. "I feel pretty good, thanks."

"I am glad."

With Teal'c gone, Amy worked on sitting up, and found her head clearing. Looking around, she saw that the naquada caduceus pendant was lying on a table by her bed. She picked up the amulet, and hung it around her neck, then brushed a hand against her forehead, where she could still feel the almost-ethereal pressure of Daniel's lips against her skin.

"Hey!"

Amy looked to the door and smiled at Jack. "Hello, Sir," she said.

"Can I come in?" He asked. "Or am I still persona non…Grandpa?"

"Grata. Please; come in."

"We bought grapes," Jack said, holding out a huge paper bag. Amy took the bag and looked inside; it was full of bare vine stalks. "We bought lots of grapes, and sat here and ate them while you slept," Jack admitted. "But here's today's delivery." He handed Amy a second, smaller bag with actual grapes in them.

Amy laughed. "Thank you," she said. "For everything. You know, you guys didn't have to sit around waiting for me."

"We felt kind of guilty for letting you get grabbed," Jack replied. "Besides; what are friends for?"

Amy smiled, took a grape and popped it in her mouth. "So what did I miss?"

"A little of this; a little of that," Jack said, awkwardly. "Anubis almost blew up the Stargate and wiped out everyone on Earth."

"Keen."

"That was before you got back, mind you," Jack added. "Oh, also…" He stopped, and looked away.

Amy frowned. "What?"

"You're not gonna like this," Jack said.

"Quinn," she realised. "He's Daniel's replacement."

Jack looked impressed. "Wow," he said. "That's…"

"He's standing with the others outside the window," Amy told the Colonel. "Looking almost as awkward as you."

"Ah."

"Don't worry about it," Amy reassured him. "I'll live with it. Just…" She paused.

"What?" Jack asked, pensively.

"Make sure he understands; he might get the office, but the sexy stalker doesn't come with the job."

Jack stared at her for a moment, then smiled. "I'll be sure to tell him," he promised. "I'll tell the others they can come in. Do you want to see them together or one at a time?"

Amy pondered. "Ooh; two groups," she suggested. "SG-11, then SG-1. Oh, and Sir?"

"Captain?"

"You did the right thing."

Jack stopped a moment, working that one out. "Thanks," he said, with feeling. "Coming from you that means a lot." He smiled. "There'll be guards on the door for the moment," he told her. "Until you feel up to debriefing and explaining what happened to the Goa'uld."

Amy groaned. "Well, that's a long story," she said.

"When you feel up to it," Jack repeated.

 

A short while after her various well-wishers had left, Amy received another visitor.

"Paul?" She sat up, surprised. "I never expected to see you again,"  she admitted. "Look; about what I said. I was…high, at the time."

"You had an evil alien space weevil wrapped around your brainstem," Paul corrected. "Don't worry; I know."

"You do?"

"Alice and I were the ones who found out it had gone into you," he explained. "We flew up as soon as we could, but you were already gone. I'd found out a lot on my own so they filled me in on the rest when I got to the SGC. I'm all signed up now; SG-17, Geophysical Survey."

"Congratulations." Amy breathed a sigh of relief. "From now on," she said. "I'm sticking at the Mountain; if they'll have me back. No more contact with consultants; I hate having to lie to them." Something he had said struck a discord in her mind. "Who's Alice?"

"Sergeant Fry," Paul explained, refusing to meet Amy's eye.

"Oh, fickleness!" She exclaimed, laughing. "Frailty thy name is Paul!"

"Hey; you gave me the brush off pretty clearly," Paul replied, with mock indignation. "And you were missing for a month." He smiled gently. "You had us all pretty worried for a while."

Amy nodded. "I'm sorry; but I was in good hands."

"I'm glad to hear it." He dug in his pocket. "I brought your pendant back," he told her.

"Thanks," Amy said, touched. "But I've got a new one now." She displayed the naquada pendant."

"Shiny," Paul commended.

"You can keep the old one, if you like."

"Thank you," Paul said. "I will. As a gift from a friend?" He added, hopefully.

Amy grinned. "Friend sounds pretty good," she agreed.

**Author's Note:**

> As with Raiders of the Lost Gate and The Demiurge series, this fiction is in part inspired by the wilder fringes of Nazi archaeology.  
> The Adlerhorst – or Eagle's Nest – at Berchtesgaden was Hitler's private hideaway.


End file.
